Beresford, L. (2012). Reducing Unnecessary Medical Resources as Quality Initiative. The Hospitalist. Retrieved from http://www.the-hospitalist.org/details/article/1478935/Reducing_Unnecessary_Medical_Resources_as_Quality_Initiative.html.

“An emerging category of hospital quality initiatives, comparable to preventing medical errors and improving quality and patient safety, could be labeled “waste management” or “waste reduction.” “Waste” in this sense refers not to biohazardous substances in need of disposal, but to the overuse of medical resources—such as lab tests and pharmaceuticals—when they are not helpful to a patient’s medical management.”

“If patients are getting CAT scans they don’t really need or an extra day of telemetry because we don’t have criteria for who should be on telemetry, that’s wasteful, it’s costly, and it could be dangerous,” Dr. Wachter explained at the UCSF Management of the Hospitalized Patient meeting last October. “The data are clear that 30% of what we do in American medicine is of no value to patients—and some substantial portion of that is harmful as well. I think we as hospitalists should be identifying what these wasteful things are—and making the hard decisions to stop them.”